Maigret's Doubts: Inspector Maigret #52

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"One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us... Read more

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"One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories." ?The Guardian

Inspector Maigret finds himself caught in the middle of a husband and wife duo's case of "he said/she said"?with murderous consequences

An unusually quiet day for Inspector Maigret at the Quai des Orfèvres is disturbed by a visit from mild-mannered toy salesman Xavier Manton. Maigret is taken aback by Manton's revelation that he suspects his wife of plotting to poison him. And when he receives a visit from Madame Manton expressing her own grave concerns later that day, he finds himself deeply conflicted, unsure of whom to trust. Maigret heeds the advice of his seniors and begins investigating the couple?and with every turn, new complications arise. When the case comes to a boil and a body is discovered, everyone, including Maigret, is shocked.

Maigret's Doubts is an engrossing mystery of marriage and deceit that forces the reader to question whether our brilliant inspector may be fallible after all.

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Author Biography

Georges Simenon (Author)

Georges Simenon was born in Liege, Belgium, in 1903. He is best know in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

It was indeed a photograph, a picture of a woman. But the face was completely hidden, scribbled all over in red ink. Someone had tried to obliterate the head, someone very angry. The pen had bitten into the paper. There were so many criss-crossed lines that not a single square millimetre had been left visible.

What was the woman doing here? In a stable, wearing pearl earrings, her stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes! She must have been alive when she got there because the crime had been committed after ten in the evening. But how? And why?

A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And there were at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches that had the same leitmotif of hanging. On the edge of a forest: a man hanging from every branch.

Maigret's peaceful retirement in the countryside is disrupted when a relative unwittingly embroils himself in a crime he did not commit and the inspector returns to Police Headquarters in Paris once again.

In Maigret's office, he is searched. His suit is new, his underwear is new, his shoes are new. All identifying labels have been removed. No identification papers. Five crisp thousand-franc bills have been slipped into one of his pockets. A distressed man is found wandering the streets of Paris, with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

In the darkness, the main room is as vast as a cathedral. A great empty space. Some warmth is still seeps from the radiators. Delfosse strikes a match. They stop a moment to catch their breath, and work out how far they have still to go. And suddenly the match falls to the ground, as Delfosse gives a cry and rushes back towards the washroom door.

Instead of the detail filling itself in and becoming clearer, it seemed to escape him. The face of the man in the ill-fitting coat misted up so that it hardly looked human. The circumstances of Monsieur Gallet's death all seem fake: the name the deceased was travelling under and his presumed profession, and more worryingly, his family's grief.

Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted.

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Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted.

Instead of the detail filling itself in and becoming clearer, it seemed to escape him. The face of the man in the ill-fitting coat misted up so that it hardly looked human. The circumstances of Monsieur Gallet's death all seem fake: the name the deceased was travelling under and his presumed profession, and more worryingly, his family's grief.

In Maigret's office, he is searched. His suit is new, his underwear is new, his shoes are new. All identifying labels have been removed. No identification papers. Five crisp thousand-franc bills have been slipped into one of his pockets. A distressed man is found wandering the streets of Paris, with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

It was indeed a photograph, a picture of a woman. But the face was completely hidden, scribbled all over in red ink. Someone had tried to obliterate the head, someone very angry. The pen had bitten into the paper. There were so many criss-crossed lines that not a single square millimetre had been left visible.

In the darkness, the main room is as vast as a cathedral. A great empty space. Some warmth is still seeps from the radiators. Delfosse strikes a match. They stop a moment to catch their breath, and work out how far they have still to go. And suddenly the match falls to the ground, as Delfosse gives a cry and rushes back towards the washroom door.

A local scandal intrudes on Maigret's seaside holiday in book twenty-eight of the new Penguin Maigret series. At what point in the day could the note have been slipped into his pocket, his left breast pocket? It was an ordinary sheet of glazed squared paper, probably torn out of an exercise book.

"One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories." ?The Guardian...

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